A Soviet Jihad against Hitler: Ishan Babakhan Calls Central Asian Muslims to War

Abstract

The efforts of the Nazis to appeal to Muslims in the Soviet Union, the Balkans, and elsewhere to join the German orbit are now well known. These efforts sometimes succeeded: in Soviet Crimea, for example, some twenty thousand Tatar Muslims joined the German ranks as volunteers. The simultaneous, large-scale efforts by Stalin’s government to rally Soviet Muslims to the fight against Hitler has gone largely unnoticed, however, perhaps because much of the evidence for these efforts remains buried in Russian and Central Asian archives. Drawing on some of this archival evidence, this paper introduces the Soviet-sponsored jihad against Hitler, and it argues for the revision of common conceptions concerning Islamic institutions and state propaganda in the Soviet Muslim context.